topher

Blogs have a rep for being simply places for disgruntled schmucks to vent.  This is my contribution to that rep.

There’s a store across the street from my house.  They sell new and used sporting equipment to kids and anyone else who wants it.

They don’t have a parking lot, so people park on the street.  At some point in the past, that annoyed someone who owned my house, so they got the city to put up a sign saying No Parking At Any Time on our side of the street.

As far as I can tell, people drive from all over town to park in front of that sign.

Here’s an example.

8 thoughts on “Free parking at Topher’s!

  1. i love how petulant you sound in this post. justifiably so, i might add. what’s the point of the sign if there’s no penalty. IS there a penalty? if not, can you just remove the sign? nothing like a good axe to cure what ails ya…

  2. Well, there’s the normal city penalty of parking illegally. But the cops that eat the restarant across the street don’t seem to mind.

    I guess it wouldn’t bother me so much if it weren’t for the trash. It’s also apparently in vogue to empty ones car while parked there. Every week before I mow I go out there and fill up a grocery bag with trash. It’s only a strip about 8 feet wide and 30 feet long.

  3. Maybe we need to make up our own parking tickets with a picture of your father-in-law with full camo and bow on it 🙂 to get their attention. No parking or else!!! Rambo will get youl

  4. Were I you, I would be so tempted to sabotage those vehicles. Preferably in some way that would cause problems a day or two later. Thumbtacks glued to the windshield wipers, perhaps?

    It reminds me of an annoyance I used to have at my folks house when I got home from Cornerstone every day. I usually fell asleep on a chair only to be awakened by the screeching tires of every car that exited from the high school two houses down. I wanted to shoot out their tires as they drove by but I think that would have taken a lot of practice.

  5. You could put something in the edge of the yard to prevent that….such as a few carefully placed wooden posts…some lawn spikes….or how about a few landmines? *grins impishly*

    Okay, so only the wooden posts is serious – but if you strategically placed 3 or so posts at the edge of your lawn there, it *would* solve that problem. And if someone were to knock those over, the crime moves to vandalism or willful destruction of property, rather than just a minor parking violation…

  6. Personally, my house is on a corner. Local children often cut across our lawn rather than turning with the sidewalk. At times, you’ve actually been able to see a beaten down trail in the grass.

    For years, I’ve joked that the solution was simply to put up a bunch of rose bushes in the lawn. The main criteria for selecting the bushes would not be looks. It would be thorn size.

    You might look into it too.

  7. I’ve thought about most of that stuff. I thought about seeding the lawn with tire punchers, but I’m sure someone would get hurt. I thought about putting posts up, but technically, the city owns that land. Everything between the sidewalk and the street belongs to the city, but the home owner is required to maintain it. Besides, why should I have to do anything?

    If I were less lazy, I’d just go out there and take a picture of the back of every vehicle that does it, with the sign in the picture, and mail it to the police. Hopefully they’d ticket those people. A single offense wouldn’t do much, but if they could write 50-60 tickets per month off that, that’s serious money.

    We usually get 4-6 cars park there per day.

  8. It could be worse… It could be an EXTREMELY big store that was really popular with twice to three times the traffic.

    See if you can track down a few of the cops at the restaurant around the corner to help 🙂

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *